Wow. That's one of the best pieces of writing I've read. It paints wonderfully vivid pictures and tells succinct stories.

I went through a templating phase once. Everything I wrote in C++ had to be a template. Every policy decision needed to be made at compile-time, and a pointer was never used in favor of a smart container. I finally realized the simple truth that you don't need to include a header file to use a float pointer.